


Gifts

by pennylehane



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Bar fights, Blackmail, Fluff, Gifts, M/M, Really Overdone Gifts, Romance, Sugar Daddy, sugar daddy jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-12
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-16 14:00:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12344094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennylehane/pseuds/pennylehane
Summary: Thomas Jefferson doesnt know what to with money. This causes more problems than the obvious one.





	Gifts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roseclipping](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseclipping/gifts).



“Who are you fucking?” John asked, flopping over the back of the threadbare couch. He’s spoiling for a fight, a growl curling over his shoulders.

Alex jolted out of his seat, twisting to stare up at him from his new position on the floor. “What the hell? What makes you think I’m fucking anyone?”

“You haven’t crawled into bed with me for like, over a month.”

“Screw you and your judgemental eyebrows, Laurens.” Alex grabbed his laptop and flopped himself down in a casual splay over the couch. “Maybe I got some self-respect.”

“In your dreams. Seriously, Ham, who?”

“Seriously, Laurens, fuck off. You miss this dick that much?”

“I’ve seen better dicks on pigeons. I just wanna meet the man who Alexander Hamilton won’t admit to fucking.” His voice had taken on a sing-song tone as he lolled forwards, breath puffing on Alex’s neck.

“Hey, who says it’s a man? If there even is anyone.”

 He sniffed. “You reek of ocean breeze shower gel. The kind for men whose masculinity is threatened by vanilla—man, you really are scraping the bottom of the barrel--”

Alex leaped up before John could start identifying any other scents. “Come on, I want pizza.”

“I’ll pay if you tell me about mystery man.” John slung an arm round Alex’s shoulders, warm and wiry.

“You’ve paid for every meal we’ve eaten together since college,” Alex sniped, relieved. “That’s what gas station bathrooms are for.”

“Someone’s gotta feed you, you fucking idiot.”

***

Alex remembers the interaction because a week later, when Thomas Jefferson presses a bottle of shower gel with an actual brand name into his palm, he looks down and sees its vanilla scented. He bursts out in a startled laugh.

Thomas rolls, pinning him against the wall by the door. “None of that,” he chided. “I like my boys smelling sweet, not like gas station hand soap. Fuckable.”

“It’s cheap,” he protested. Swallowed down the rush in his chest, and cursed the smallness of his voice, where he had wanted to mock.

Thomas smiled at him, a little flash of sharp white teeth. “This is expensive,” he promised. “Now you run along home, boy.”

***

Alex can’t get a read on him. Maybe that’s part of the fun, the thrill, the gut-twisting anticipation of what might come next.

It had started the way most of Alex’s romantic, or less romantic, liasons tended to—drunk and stumbling, giddy and flirtatious and sprawling proud and delighted over Thomas’ bedsheets. Waking there he next morning, just another in a string of notches on his bed.

But then it was a second time, then a third, a fourth, and then Thomas was sauntering into his office after work, wrapping an arm around Alex’s waist and dragging him home three times a week. They didn’t talk.

When Thomas bought him gifts, they were for Thomas’ pleasure. The soap. A necklace, leather braided over leather in detailed knotwork patterns. Clothes in soft, fine fabrics and warm colours. Little scraps of lace Alex left hung over the heater for John to scoff and roll his eyes at.

He tugged his coat over the new shirt, silky and fine and every stitch bright with wealth. Turned from side to side in the mirror with a grin tugging at his lips.

John clicked his tongue. “If you’re done peacocking, our uber’s here.”

“You jealous?” Alex asked, smoothing back his hair. It had never had this shine to it before, he noted.

“Of that shirt?” John rolled his eyes, swinging the front door open. “Fuck no. Wouldn’t mind having your mystery man to shower me with gifts, though.”

Alex shouldered him hard as he breezed by. “You don’t have my good looks, I’m afraid.”

That was the night it happened.

It was nothing that hadn’t happened a thousand times. There was the four of them, in a bar. The lights dancing above them and the neon sign blurring and twisting. Thomas Jefferson leaning over the table with a smart comment and that smirk.

The table was hard under his palms as he shoved it forwards, crashing hard into Jefferson’s shins. Alex was over it seconds later, hearing the gleeful laugh of John breaking free of someone’s hold behind him. A fist hit his jaw. He rolled back and swung again, and again, bundled until his back slammed into the floor. He kicked, hard, and heard something snap.

Less than a minute and it was all over. Big hands caught him around his biceps and yanked him back. The grimy boards slipped under his feet until they hit the tarmac of the parking lot. The cold September breeze slapped him half-sober.

Herc was standing warily between him and the door. Someone behind him was throwing up.

“Shit,” Laurens slurred. “Shit, man, I’m sorry. Shitfuck.”

Alexander turned around just in time to see Lafayette glare up at John between retches and mumble a French curse.

“I really didn’t mean to hit you, man, I was aiming for the other guy.” John yanked open Herc’s car door.

“Aren’t we too old to be getting into bar fights?” Herc grumbed, yanking him back by the collar. “You’re not driving, you drunk.”

“You’re just pissy that we had fun on _your_ night to DD,” Alex snipped back, still a little spacey as he swung open the back. John shoved him ahead to make room for himself.

There was a thump and a groan as Lafayette poured himself into the passenger seat, and Herc revved up. The minivan trundled amicably out into the street and back towards their apartments before the sirens even started.

***

Alex rammed an entire sandwich into his mouth, skimming hurriedly over his notes with one hand while the other swilled a half-empty coffee mug. John slouched down in the side of the kitchen doorway, thumbing through the mail.

He ripped an envelope open, and frowned down at it. “You’re a lawyer, right?”

“Yuhuh,” Alex replied through his mouthful of bread.

“So if I was like, being sued for assault, you could fix that?”

He swallowed. “I’m a lawyer, not the mafia. Uh. You’re the fuck?”

John waggled a summons at him absently as he swigged orange juice straight out of the carton.

“Wait, Thomas Jefferson?” Alex read. “I was in that fight too!”

“What, and you want to get sued?”

“I want to know why I’m not getting sued.” Heat and bitterness coiled against one another in his guts like anxious serpents. “I gotta go--”

He swung his back onto his shoulder and left.

“You forgetting something?” Laurens yelled after him. “I’m still getting sued!”

Alex paused in swinging the door shut. “I’ll deal with it later!”

 _Slam_.

He vibrated in his skin the whole trip in, shouldered his way straight through to Thomas’ desk without pausing to acknowledge a single one of his co-workers. The door creaked swung shut behind him.

“Alex!” Thomas greeted, a note of smug delight creeping into his gaze. “I wasn’t expecting you _quite_ so early in the day, but I’m sure I can make arrangements.”

“You’re pressing charges against John?” Alexander demanded.

Thomas, with his usual sense of timing, pushed himself up on the desk, hobbled around to reveal sweatpants and a plastered leg. “Any reason I _shouldn’t_ be pressing charges against some lout who broke my damn leg in a drunken bar fight?”

“You--” Sandy dryness scraped at Alex’s throat. Thomas still had that slow, seductive grin. Like this was nothing. He had—unbelievably—thought better of him. “What the hell, Jefferson? You know I’m the one that did that!”

“Do I?”

“Laf was holding John back the whole time, I’m the only one that even got near you!”

Jefferson scoffed, rolling his eyes as he slouched back into his chair. “Is it that hard to imagine I don’t want it getting out that I got into a bar fight with my _junior_ co-worker? Especially given…”

Alex flipped him off at the dismissive hand gesture encircling his smaller stature. “So you’re pinning the blame on John because, what, you’re embarrassed to lose a fight to me? Yeah fucking right. You want me to believe you’re gonna pay me off next? Keep me from talking to the media?” He shook his head so hard that a wave of hair slipped loose from his tie and tumbled down over his face. Thomas was giving him a long, slow look, from top to bottom. The sand in his throat twisted, turned to quicksand filling his lungs, drowning him.

“I think we could come to an arrangement,” Thomas said, resting his arm down on the desk with a heavy thunk, like a coffin lid slamming shut.

Alex shook his head, the floor swaying under him in horror, and fled the room.

***

When he tried to tell john, he had to break off midway through to rush to the toilet and puke. He couldn’t say if it were the disgust, or the hangover, or both, or neither, but by the time John’s coppery tan hands were stroking the hair back from his temples, Alex was trembling and choking.

“Okay,” John murmured, petting his hair soothingly. “Okay, Alex, okay.”

He wasn’t much good at soothing, but Alex pushed himself up to the sink and swilled water around his mouth.

“That fucking bastard,” John snarled when Alex turned back to him. He was better at protective. “What the fuck, Alex?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“Well, yeah, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me next time you’re fucking the guy we’re getting into a dumb bar fight with, especially if it is Thomas Jefferson, but _what the fuck_?”

“I told you what,” Alex said, petulant.

John paced like a caged wolf, bristling. “Alex, he _threatened you_. He threatened you _using me_!”

“I know what happened, John!” His voice broke. Alex regrouped. “I didn’t think this would happen! Yeah, we kind of get on each other’s nerves, but I never thought he was, that he’d do anything, like this.”

John’s strong arms were around him, shuffling Alex back into the living room and down onto the sofa where he could flop, useless, against his chest. “Tell me what he said,” he demanded.

“Don’t be sensible at me!” Alex bristled.

John blew on his hair.

He sighed. “I don’t even know. I kind of ran out. But I told him to drop the case, and he said he wouldn’t because he didn’t want anyone to know he’d been fighting me, and then he said we could. We could. Come to an arrangement. That’s when I walked out.”

“It’s okay,” John promised again when Alex’s breath hitched. He pulled him a little closer, arm wrapped protectively over his shoulder. They lay like that for as long as t took for Alex’s breath to even out and his hands to stop trembling where he stared at them, clasped against his thighs. “Okay. We still need to deal with the lawsuit. Can I get up?”

Alex nodded mutely.

“Then you can work out how much money we need while I go and get every single thing he bought you into a trash bag.” John stood, stretching.

Alex fumbled for his phone. “If the rent hasn’t gone out yet I think we’re okay, we can ask for an extension on it. I’ll check.”

John nodded and headed for the bathroom to gather up Alex’s new bathroom supplies, leaving him suddenly aware of the soft vanilla scent of his skin, the cool sheen of his hair where it edged into view.

The shudder almost made him drop his phone. Instead, the thumbed past the lock screen and opened his banking app, typing out the password with an almost blind stare.

Then he blinked, and looked again, disbelieving. Turned the screen off and repeated the entire process. “John?”

There was a thump as John dropped what he was doing in the bathroom and ambled back in. Alex tapped into his recent transactions.

“I don’t believe it?” he said, the tail end of it curling up into a question. He turned the phone around.

John blinked. “I don’t get it?”

“I was being sarcastic!” Alex said, defensive. “When he came out with that line of shit about not wanting anyone to know he’d lost a fight with his junior co-worker and me being smaller and I asked if he was gonna pay me off to stop me talking to the media, and he’s? He’s sent me money?”

It felt impossibly stupid, stupidly hopeful, but the transaction was lit up in obnoxiously green text.

John shrugged, still gaping. “We might have overestimated his Machiavellian genius?” he offered.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Alex said, almost completely without tone. He exited the banking app and switched to texting. Jefferson’s contact name was saved as _Dick_.

John snorted. “Classy.”

“Fuck off,” Alex mumbled as he tapped out a text, reading it aloud. “Why… is there… $1600… in my… bank… account?”

“Good start.”

They both watched the read receipt pop up, and a second later, a screenshot. Another $1600 was being transferred from Thomas’ account to Alex’s.

John burst out laughing at Alexander’s squawk of horror.

“Shut up!” he snapped. “I’m telling him to drop the case.”

Another awkwardly weighted pause dangled over his phone until it vibrated.

“He did it?” John demanded. “Just like that?”

Alex transferred the money back to Jefferson and put his phone aside in a slow, mechanical movement. “I need,” he said carefully, “All, the alcohol. All of it.”

John stepped out into the kitchen to oblige him. In the meantime, unbeknownst to either of them, a panicking Thomas Jefferson whined aloud at how hard a bargain Alexander was driving, and forwarded him $4500.

***

A week later, Thomas visited Alexander’s apartment for the first time, pretending the smirk curling his lips was mocking, rather than fond. The sheets of Alex’s bed were cheap, coarse, cotton, but his skin was warm, and yieldingly soft.  Fresh bruises blossomed in the tan skin of his neck, his wrists, matching the scuffmarks on forest green walls. Thomas kissed him, tasting his own red wine on Alexander’s lips, the honey scent of his favourite shampoo catching in his breath when he pressed up against him.

When they were lying still together, Alex’s warmth and shifting humming over Thomas’ skin, he found his eyes drooping. A contented moan brushed his lips.

Alexander bumped back against him.

“I’m gonna buy you more jewellery,” Thomas promised.

Alexander growled, petulant and fierce as a kitten. “Thomas.”

“I like seeing my things on you,” he said, voice hot and low.

“Oh dear god you’re a sugar baby,” said a new voice from the door. Thomas sat bolt upright in shock as Alexander rolled over to bury his face in the pillow.

“Fuck off, John,” he mumbled.

John Laurens gave them a sneering grin. “You _are_ ,” he crowed. “You’re Jefferson’s sugar baby!”

“He is not,” Thomas snapped, rubbing a soothing thumb over Alex’s shoulder blades.

“How much money are you giving him a month?”

Thomas opened his mouth to open the question, and then paused as Alex sat up in a start. “You still haven’t stopped,” he said. “I definitely made it clear I was _not_ blackmailing you.”

Thomas shrugged. “I mean, even if you’re not--”

“I’m not!”

“He’s not.”

“—I still want to give you things.”

Alex’s dark eyes peered up at him, hard as steel pins. “I thought you just wanted this whole thing to be _more you your taste_ ,” he mimicked.

“I like making you pretty,” Thomas purred. He reached over to card his fingers through Alexander’s hair, dimly aware of Laurens gagging in the doorway. When Alex’s eyes fell closed, almost humming with bliss, he leaned in to add, “ _Fuckable._ ”

Alex moaned.

Thomas laughed out loud. “You really do get off on that!”

“Fuck you,” Alex shoved him half out of bed. “Fuck both of you assholes.”

“I mean before he showed up—”

“Shut up, Jefferson.”

“The door was shut!”

Alex stood up, unbothered by his nakedness, and shoved Laurens out of the doorway so he could get to the shower, grumbling. Thomas leaned back on Alexander’s linen pillows with all the insouciance he could muster under John’s narrow gold gaze.

“If you’re going to keep giving him money, the least you could do is replace some of the shitty furniture in here,” he said eventually.

Thomas blinked at him, face frozen in his trademark arrogant smirk. “I’m not getting the shovel talk?”

“You already know if you hurt him I’ll kill you,” John said, casual. “I wouldn’t have predicted it sure, but if he wants you that’s his deficiency.”

Thomas bridled despite the warm flush seeping through his ribcage.

“But you want to give him stuff? He has no idea what to do with money. Everything you gave him is still sitting in his account waiting to be returned.”

“He bought a new coat!” It was hideously bright green. Thomas had loved tearing it off him.

John shook his head. “I bought him that.”

“Why would you do that to me?” Thomas grinned back when John actually laughed, and then hesitated. “What do you think I _should_ be giving him?”

“Whatever floats your boat, asshole. I’m just giving you a bit of advice. Gifts work better than money. He prefers supporting himself.” John had the hangdog look of one who had tried and failed.

Thomas nodded, and then gestured John out of the room so he could find some pants.

The next day, Alex came out of his bedroom to find their apartment brimming with flowers, a layer so thick he barely noticed the velvety new couch. He stepped back into the bedroom, and dropped his forehead against the door.

“Thomas,” he whined. “Why?”

Broad, strong arms wrapped around him, tugging him back into the warmth of Thomas’ bare chest. “I like buying you things,” he murmured in his ear.

 Alex spun in his arms and tipped his head back. “This looks like something out of _The Great Gatsby_.”

“You’re into it,” Thomas sing-songed. He dipped down to kiss Alexander, tasting the soft warmth of his lips.

Alex’s back fell against the door as he gasped up into Thomas’ lips. They stayed there, entangled in one another, for what felt longer than hours, until they were interrupted by Laurens’ voice swearing at the cascade of lilies in the entryway to his on bedroom.

“Next time--”

“There is no next time,” Alexander protested.

Thomas snorted. “Next time I’m buying you silk sheets. I refuse to sleep in that bearpit.”

“I mean I wasn’t planning on sleeping in it…”

“Oh, god, this is it, the honeymoon phase is ending,” Thomas said, in as dramatic a tone as he could muster. “What can I give you to save our relationship, darling? A penthouse? Diamond?”

“Don’t you dare!”

Thomas backed away, grinning, and stooped to scoop his phone up from Alex’s bedside table.

Alexander hit him in a dive, tacking him to the bed and pinning him there. “You are not buying me diamonds!”

“You prefer rubies? Emeralds?”

“Thomas, no,” he whined, scrambling up Thomas’ outstretched arm after the phone. “no, Thomas, don’t!”

His frantic scramble tossed them both off the bed where they landed hard, giggling like schoolchildren.

“A bed,” Thomas said, once he had Alex pinned. “I’m buying you a bigger bed.”

“I don’t need a bigger bed,” Alex grumbled without heat.

“We can pretend it’s for me.”

“If anything you’ve ever done _not_ for you?”

Thomas dropped down on his elbows so he was pressed flush against Alexander, lips against lips. “I can think of a few things.”

**Author's Note:**

> So I can officially not handle this weird stream of consciousness style I decided to try out... Hopefully it worked for this!


End file.
